Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton was one of the country's greatest runners—she was also a high-priced call-girl. Why would a woman with so much to lose choose to play that game?

Curled into the corner of a plush sofa in the lobby of a hotel in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, three-time Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton was fielding questions from the starstruck president of the local all-ages track club before taking the stage as the honorary guest at the group's February 2012 awards banquet. One of America's fastest-ever female middle-distance runners, and a representative for Reebok and Nike at the pinnacle of her career, Favor Hamilton is beloved here in her home state as much for her readiness over the past quarter century to pop up cheering at charity runs and promote locally produced soy sauce and green beans as she is for her athletic prowess. Dressed for the event in an elegant black sweater and knee-high black boots—her slightly sidelong, wry grin dazzling as ever—she gamely ticked off her career highlights for the club's president, Wade Zwiener: winning 11 Wisconsin state high school titles; snagging an unprecedented nine NCAA titles at the University of Wisconsin, and, of course, making it to the Olympics—"something I'd trained for since I was a little girl."

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Since her retirement from professional competition in 2006 at 37—with a body "almost like an 80-year-old, from all the running I've done," as she's said—she's been running three to five miles five days a week, she told Zwiener, which is the sweet spot that "seems to keep me injury-free." She's been open in recent years about her use of Zoloft and therapy to combat depression, but on this night she was effusive about her sport's mental-health benefits, calling running "the magic drug for me my entire life." And she was funny, putting her finger to her chin, Diane Sawyer–style, at one point to purr (as well as a woman with a strong heartland twang can), "What do you think running brings, Wade? Let's turn the tables." Zwiener giggled: "No, I totally agree with you—[it helps with] the mood-type stuff. And it helps keep the beer gut off middle-aged guys like me."

Wrapping up, Zwiener expressed humble thanks: "I just thought, Ya know, when am I going to get the chance to talk to Suzy Favor Hamilton? It's awesome!" And with that, Favor Hamilton jumped up, spun Zwiener around in his seat to face his buddy standing by with a camera, and bent down to give him a big kiss on the cheek. "Did we get that?" she said, laughing, to the camera guy. "Oh, jeez," said Zwiener, adjusting his glasses and blushing. "I'm going to frame that one. I mean, jeez!"

Favor Hamilton's flirty buss, while charming, seemed oddly prefeminist, in the fashion of a 1950s starlet dishin' out a dash of sauce—except perhaps when she gushed to Zwiener about recently having won the Rock 'n' Roll "stiletto race" in Vegas: "In my bra, too!…They were like, 'She is a go-getter!'…If you google the stiletto race, you'll get to see parts of it." Looking back a year later, however, the truly surreal moment of the encounter came when Zwiener asked Favor Hamilton what she'd been up to lately.

"A lot," she replied, nodding wide-eyed.

As much of the world now knows, in addition to selling real estate and raising a daughter, now seven, with her husband, Favor Hamilton at the time was working as a $600-per-hour call girl, scheduling dates in Las Vegas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. When a reporter for The Smoking Gun—presumably tipped off by one of her clients—confronted Favor Hamilton in the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel early last December, she initially denied involvement with Haley Heston's Private Collection, billed on its now dismantled website as "the premier Boutique Escort Agency of Las Vegas." Yet when the reporter showed Favor Hamilton, who used the curiously midwestern white-bread alias Kelly Lundy, evidence to the contrary, likely from the escort agency's tweets, the once mighty athlete crumpled. She said her husband, Mark Hamilton, a former University of Wisconsin baseball player whom she met her freshman year of college and married a week after graduation, knew about her work but didn't approve. And she never thought she'd get caught, she said, because, well, Tiger Woods, "the biggest athlete ever, obviously thought he could never get caught."

The Smoking Gun story broke on December 20. Later the same day, Favor Hamilton released a series of Twitter posts explaining that she'd been drawn to escorting "because it provided many coping mechanisms for me when I was going through a very challenging time with my marriage and my life." In her carefully worded mea culpa (wisely, she skipped the Tiger Woods comparison here), she wrote: "I do not expect people to understand. But the reasons for doing this made sense to me at the time and were very much related to depression."

The news of Favor Hamilton's double life—in the escort promo pictures that raced across the Internet, "Kelly" was shown crouching in stilettos or standing on a bed in a black bikini, her face always strategically concealed—prompted predictable commentary about the lamentable state of modern marriage, as well as equally predictable briefs in defense of prostitution as sex among consenting adults. The exposé also inspired a bumper crop of lewd jokes and who knows how many idle fantasies (three married women I know had dreams about flying to meet strange men for sex after hearing of Favor Hamilton's exploits). Then came the press releases: Disney, Foot Locker, and the Rock 'n' Roll Marathon Series quickly dropped Favor Hamilton as an endorser. Even the Wisconsin Potato & Vegetable Growers Association no longer wished to have the tarnished athlete beaming over a bowl of spuds in its ads.

While Favor Hamilton has obviously struggled with depression—this wasn't the first time she'd spoken publicly about it—what she did remains astonishing to many. She was, after all, a much-admired woman with a young daughter, a lovely home in Madison, and flourishing real estate and motivational-speaking businesses. How could she do something so risky for herself and her family? (The Las Vegas police are not investigating Favor Hamilton, according to a department spokesman, though she could still be vulnerable to federal prosecution for sex trafficking across state lines.) Yet with every fresh tale of an athlete flaming out spectacularly—and, lately, with Manti Te'o, Oscar Pistorius, Lance Armstrong, and, yes, Suzy making headlines, there have been a slew of them—we're forced to acknowledge that the same qualities that make elite athletes great may also contribute to their downfall.

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Favor Hamilton's path as a runner began with a simple, joyful insight she had as a girl. Growing up in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, she loved to play on a string of wooded trails beside the banks of the Plover River, racing to collect branches to build forts with her older brother and two older sisters. "Pretty soon I'd be galloping," she once said. "I remember that it felt so easy, running like that for hours. I actually pretended that I was a horse." With coaching from her father, Suzy ran her first big race, a 400 meter, in fifth grade. She shot past all the girls, then all the boys. And blazing into the finish, she heard spectators shouting "Su-zy! Su-zy! Su-zy!" That was the moment, she's said, that got her hooked. Reaping more medals than any other Wisconsin runner (again, boy or girl) while in high school, she became known as a wunderkind, genetically gifted with extraordinary lung capacity and a kick (track speak for finishing speed).""When the gun fired, she just sprang out like a ball of muscle," recalls Madison writer Ruth Conniff, who ran against Favor Hamilton in high school meets in the mid-1980s. "She blew everyone away. It was amazing."

Ed Nuttycombe, coach of the University of Wisconsin's men's track-and-field team for the past 29 years, watched Suzy's training closely while she was on the UW women's team, and he says that while she had enormous natural talent, she also trained harder than almost anyone else. A runner has to put herself in the position of being pushed to the limit again and again so it becomes familiar to body and brain, he says—and she did just that. Following her fierce workouts, she subjected herself to equally brutal ice baths to ameliorate the pain and damage inflicted by the constant pounding of feet.

Veteran coach Brooks Johnson, who's worked with runners at every Olympics since 1968, says one thing almost all his charges have had in common is "extreme needs above the norm." To compensate for perceived or real deficiencies, they must excel. "No well-adjusted person will ever become an Olympic champion!" he practically shouts. "It's the same for art, politics, music. The things that motivate elite athletes are the same things that motivate people who reach the outer limits of any activity." And sometimes get them in trouble: "Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer, Lance Armstrong, Charlie Sheen, Lindsay Lohan—I could go on and on. They go to extremes because they have extreme needs."

Johnson coached Favor Hamilton briefly in 1998, when she was part of a U.S. team he was overseeing at an international meet in Johannesburg. At that point, her desperation for approval was very clear to him. One day she pushed progressively harder in training, running much faster than he or her coach back home had prescribed. And after she "really smoked" her last time, ignoring her coaches' wishes, she gave Johnson "a big, broad smile" that, as he wrote on his blog, signaled both "subtle defiance" and her desire "to be recognized and accepted as special." Johnson also remembers Favor Hamilton tracking him down at the end of a day in which the U.S. team, through its accumulated points, had roundly trounced the competition. "Coach, how'd I do?" she asked urgently, as if the news—apparent to all the other American runners, already celebrating—couldn't be true until she heard it from an authority figure. "When the pit bull was there, she was virtually unbeatable," Johnson tells me. "But there were also times of gross doubt and insecurity—just a need to be appreciated or coddled."

Many times, Johnson has also seen big-time athletes, accustomed to the peak experiences of their sport, seek stimulation elsewhere. One former Olympian told ELLE about his own alcohol-fueled tours of "dodgy" international fetish-sex circles—situations in which, he said, "I deliberately put myself in trouble to get a buzz." Three months of intensive addiction treatment helped him see his own thrill-seeking habit as "innate," and he felt an instant click of recognition upon hearing of Favor Hamilton: "I could understand the excitement of going into those big hotels on the Strip, having this secret life that nobody would have even had a guess about."

Making matters worse, retiring from sports leaves many athletes vulnerable to traumatic self-doubt. New York City psychologist Vivian Diller, PhD, a former model and dancer, specializes in treating women who've made their reputations in fields where beauty and physicality are paramount. People who achieve success at a young age—and grow up thinking parents, coaches, agents, and fans expect continued virtuosity from them—generally struggle the most when their careers end, Diller says. Often these people "feel devastated and will do anything—whether it's working for an escort service, taking drugs, or whatever it is to give them that high."

Sarah Toland, a former teammate of Favor Hamilton's, vividly remembers how she felt nine years ago, when a torn hamstring ended her career as a professional runner. "I had a midlife crisis in my twenties. Running was my identity. It was what I was trying to do as a career, it was my boyfriend, it was all my friends—it was my life! What do you say when you can't run anymore? 'I'm an injured, crippled runner'?"

"[Suzy] did have a very up-and-down time at the end of her career, for sure," says Favor Hamilton friend and former Olympian Kathy Butler. After a long period in the '90s of dominating middle-distance events, Favor Hamilton made multiple attempts to recoup her former glory. She had some great runs, including second place in the 1,500-meter race—always her best event—at the 2000 Olympic trials and a win at the 2001 Prefontaine Classic. Yet she was often thwarted by injuries. And for several years, Favor Hamilton suspected her chief rival in the 1,500 meter, Regina Jacobs—who beat her in that event at the USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships every year from 2000 to 2003—was taking performance-enhancing drugs. In 2003, Jacobs was indeed caught doping (a new test showed she'd been using a previously undetectable steroid that summer, when she beat Favor Hamilton at the U.S. national championships with a last-lap surge). Favor Hamilton's husband, Mark, spoke to Sports Illustrated on her behalf: "What is done is done, but for Suzy's peace of mind she knows, 'OK, this is a little bit of vindication…. I know I was actually number one when it came to nationals all these years.' I can tell you one thing, the emotion she feels is anger."

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Then, memorably, even for those who don't follow track, there was Favor Hamilton's fall in the homestretch of the 1,500 at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She described it afterward as a fainting episode caused by dehydration but later backtracked and admitted what many had suspected, that she fell intentionally when she realized she wasn't going to win. The reason she couldn't bear to lose? She was running in honor of her brother, Dan, who suffered from bipolar disorder and had committed suicide the year before, she said, as well as for her best friend, Mary Hartzheim, a former UW teammate "dying of cancer."

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It's a story that she's told repeatedly, even as recently as last summer, but when I phoned Hartzheim's sister, Maureen Drewsen, who was also on the college team with Mary and Suzy, she said, "Suzy is a very sweet girl, but she does have some misguided intentions at times." Meaning what? Drewsen let out a long sigh. Yes, her sister died of cancer in 2005, she said, but Mary was not diagnosed with the disease until 2001, a year after Favor Hamilton's fall in Sydney.

It's hard not to see this embroidering of the truth from Brooks Johnson's point of view, as another instance of a virtual compulsion to be perceived as exceptional. Just as it seemed like it wasn't enough for Heisman hopeful Te'o to have lost his grandmother—he had to have a dead girlfriend, too—Favor Hamilton couldn't just have been missing her beloved brother; her best friend also had to be at death's door.

These days it's routine to see female athletes bare their bodies before a camera. Here we have the groundbreaking Indy and NASCAR racer Danica Patrick in a micro-bikini, pawing a convertible. There, Lindsey Vonn, the great ski racer, wearing a button-up corset, hair in dishabille, and a bedroom stare. There, Lolo Jones, the lithe hurdler, posing completely naked. But back in the '90s, as Favor Hamilton geared up for her Olympic campaigns, she was something of a pioneer of sexualized personal branding in sports. This was a time when sports and seduction were considered almost mutually exclusive. Title IX was still visible in our rearview mirrors, and women were elated to be able to participate as fully in sports as men—and to show off their strength and speed and endurance, rather than some thigh and cleavage.

Favor Hamilton's earliest forays into sports marketing were pretty tame. (And undoubtedly driven by economics: Track and field is a sport most of us tune in to only every four years, and, as a result, the athletes earn far less than basketball, tennis, or even cricket players.) While a Pert Plus commercial she did in 1992 reads today like a grainy tribute less to her body, though it was flashed on admiringly during the spot, than to her gorgeous, fluffy blond hair, the Suzy brand eventually became more overtly seductive. With Mark acting as her agent, Suzy made a swimsuit calendar in 1997 featuring her in the water and lounging in the sand, once topless. For Amy Manson, it was surprising to see her friend and fellow Nike teammate, a woman she thought looked most beautiful sweaty after a run, assuming the role of "track and field's pinup girl." But the calendar also signaled to the right people—ad creatives, that is—that Favor Hamilton was ready to deliver more skin.

In 1998, Nike featured her in a new (and bold for its time) print-ad campaign. With water sheeting onto her back, she posed naked, stooped in the guise of that famous ancient Greek statue of an athlete preparing to blast forth—the visual tickle being that she was a buff woman, not the classic buff man. The black-and-white photo was, as Manson recalls, "pretty risqué for Nike. It brought a whole new dimension in the sponsorship picture." But whatever Manson's own reservations, she says the strategy seemed to work for her friend—and not strictly in the remunerative sense. A couple years back, at a sports conference where both women were motivational speakers, Manson watched with amazement as coaches crowded around Favor Hamilton. "These men were just gaga over her. They would have lined up all night to get their picture taken with her kissing them on the cheek. I realized how much she's been rewarded with that sort of attention."

One of Favor Hamilton's friends in Madison wants to tell me, first off, that "Suzy is a sincerely nice person who maintains friendships, and, hopefully," all the people she's developed relationships with over the years "will be able to help her" now. While initially shocked to hear Suzy was working as a call girl, her friend says that after thinking about it, "I really wasn't surprised, because she likes being the center of attention—and not in a bad way." Suzy had "a very hard time turning 40," she adds. "And for someone who used to draw all this attention," and suddenly doesn't get it as often, wouldn't it be exciting, she says, to "hear someone saying you are worth $600 per hour?

"In a weird way," she continues, whispering because her husband is in the next room, "Suzy was in control. As bizarre as that sounds, she was the one in control."

Favor Hamilton's friend and very briefly her fellow teammate at UW Stephanie Herbst-Lucke (she quit the track team in her junior year, partly because she realized how hard professional runners must hustle to survive) also sees an element of escape in the escort work, of taking charge and throwing off the yoke of expectations. Favor Hamilton has had to be " 'on' her whole life," she says. "And it must be nice—if you've been the good-to-everyone girl—to once in a while be the bad girl. I'm not necessarily saying that literally. But to be the exact opposite. You know?"

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Perhaps on examination the liberating-transgression argument is not such an easy sell. Here's how "Kelly" described herself on the agency website: "I try my best to bring elegance and class to the table, and will dress appropriately for any occasion. I enjoy men of all shapes, sizes and colors, and I have an affinity for women as well (I am bisexual)…. I consider dates with couples an experience to cherish. Working with couples requires special skill and I pride myself in my ability to make a woman feel comfortable and not threatened in any way, shape, or form. A date with me will never feel rushed." Why does this sound so familiar? Oh, yes. With its promise of dutiful, Midwest-nice customer service right to the end of the deal, it's similar to a real estate agent's pitch—giving her ardent promises the unmistakable ring of a busman's holiday.

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Not to mention that she herself linked her sex work to her mental illness. The popular rap on depression is that it deadens sexual desire, and clinical surveys show the majority of people diagnosed with the condition do tend to experience reduced sex drive. Yet according to Erick Janssen, PhD, a sex researcher at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, it is also true—"and a bit of a paradox"—that up to 20 percent of men and women become more aroused when they feel depressed and anxious. (Hypersexual behavior is also associated with the mania stage of bipolar disorder, the diagnosis Favor Hamilton's brother was given.) And there's evidence that people with fewer sexual inhibitions—"for whom you might say the sexual brakes don't work as well," Janssen says—are among the most likely to seek out risky sex when they feel down and stressed. He defines sexual risk taking as not just, say, having unprotected sex with a virtual stranger but partaking in sexual encounters that may jeopardize well-being and other relationships. The same people who use sex to give themselves "a temporary sense of being alive," Janssen poignantly notes, "often feel worse" later—and may come to believe, at some point, that their compulsion has more in common with a drug addiction than with an exhilarating walk on the wild side.

As of mid-March, Favor Hamilton's motivational-speaker website had been stripped down to a single frozen home-page image: the pink silhouette of a woman running in shades, shorts, and jog bra, ponytail flying behind her like a flag. In her Twitter statement, she wrote that she is receiving "the help of a psychologist," whom she's seeing in California, according to a Madison friend. Both Favor Hamilton and her husband declined to be interviewed. Suzy will speak out eventually, Mark e-mailed me, but now their family needs "to heal."

So who knows what the future will bring for Favor Hamilton? One neighbor of hers offered a cynical prediction I heard more than once: "Oh, she'll just make a Lifetime movie and get paid. It'll be like it's no big deal—just some new facet of the Suzy marketing plan."

But if there's a pattern to Favor Hamilton's behavior that hasn't done her any, uh, favors over the years—and she's admitted as much, between the lines—it may not be selling herself (we're all doing that to some extent, all the time) but fiercely insisting that all is well when it definitely is not. Media catnip during the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, Favor Hamilton told a Wisconsin newspaper reporter that she was "happier than I've ever been. My life just keeps getting better." In a TV segment, she hopped onto a swing she has hanging in her living room to display her newfound joy in life. In a more expansive interview published by BBC News Magazine, however, she confessed that she wouldn't have dared tell her coach prior to the 1,500-meter race at the 2000 Olympics that she feared she'd lose: "That is a thought that you don't have," she said, and "if you do have it, you don't tell anybody, because that shows weakness." Falling in the race, feeling like she "let everybody down…completely destroyed me."

When people become convinced they must act in a way that contradicts their actual feelings, they often fall into what psychologists call "faking good"—swearing they're happy when they really aren't. "There's tremendous [social pressure] and momentum behind athletes to lie," says Colleen Hacker, PhD, former sport psychology consultant to the U.S. women's national soccer team. There are the parents, friends, coaches, and sponsors who, well-intentioned as they may be, want them to win; add to that, for those who make it to the Olympics, the sportscasters' pompous assertions that nothing less than the fate of nations rests on the shoulders of runners, swimmers, and skiers. Snapping under the strain of having to seem perpetually positive, some athletes, according to research Hacker has reviewed, put themselves in dangerous situations hoping to get injured, "because it's the only socially acceptable way to stop."

To me, one of the most piercing details of "the Suzy story," as it was instantly dubbed in Madison, where I also live, was reading that part of the Smoking Gun interrogation took place on a "bench off the Las Vegas Strip." I kept picturing Favor Hamilton slumped on a bench on some seedy, anonymous street—an image that contrasted sharply with an actual encounter I'd had with her about a year earlier. Showing me one of her real estate listings, she'd been warm and extremely patient with my many pesky questions, but when our meeting was over, she sprinted—flat-out, in a skirt, blond ponytail bobbing—back to her shiny BMW and zoomed down the street before I'd even reached my car. It cracked me up at the time: Man, she's still got it; she could literally flee a picky cus-tomer. But now I'm thinking that a propensity to run—from her true feelings, from disappointment and shame and fear—might be more of a problem for her than anything else. A habit stripped of the joy its physical flowering once brought: "Su-zy! Su-zy! Su-zy!"